


Baby, You're a Masterpiece

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Artist Jemma, F/M, Fluff, Meet-Cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 05:00:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7831279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Jemma is an art student, Fitz is the boy she can't stop drawing, and Daisy totally ships it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby, You're a Masterpiece

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EclecticMuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EclecticMuse/gifts).



> Written as a very belated birthday present for the fabulous eclecticmuse. Forgive the delay and I only hope you like it!

It all starts because she's looking for something to draw. She's sprawled out on the grass on a hot July afternoon, only half listening to her friends talking around her and idly rolling a stick of charcoal between her fingers until it smudges and leaves dark streaks across her knuckles. Daisy had rolled her eyes when Jemma insisted on bringing her sketchpad and drawing supplies out with her to the park, but by now she's used to it.

“What are you supposed to be doing this time? More grass?” Daisy asks. Jemma once spent three weeks straight drawing the same stretch of Central Park and trying to get the bend of the grass right. (She got a lot of odd looks from the guy with the hot dog cart.)

“No, Professor Weaver says I need to work on my portraiture for the fall,” she says and frowns. Jemma likes landscapes, like the massive mural of the Cornwall coast she painted on her bedroom wall back in high school. She likes big sweeps of color and dots of paint that turn into flowers when she steps back and the casual flick of her brush against the canvas. What she doesn't like is the painstaking pencil lines of portraiture, the endless sketching and erasing and resketching, or the way none of her people's noses ever seem to come out right. But what Professor Weaver says goes and so she's spent most of her summer trying to improve her portraits and failing miserably. There's a whole wall of pictures of Daisy, Trip, and their entire circle of friends hanging up in their shared apartment, none of them looking quite right. 

“Maybe you just need to find the right subject. Like Colin Firth or something,” Daisy says and Jemma blushes furiously. She never should have mentioned that her ideal man distinctly resembled Colin Firth circa Bridget Jones' Diary. “Or some kind of cute guy. Ask if he can come in for your figure drawing class.”

Jemma flops over and buries her face in the grass. Three years into college and she's still never had a boyfriend. It's not that she cares, exactly. She's perfectly happy to spend every Friday night with her sketchbooks and paperback novels and the cat she adopted six months ago. It's only that she's curious as to what all the fuss is about. But she's always been awkward around boys, especially the ones she thinks she might like, and despite Daisy's coaching and tight tops, she can't seem to keep herself from blushing, stammering, and bolting in the opposite direction. 

Eventually, her friends move away to play a game of Ultimate Frisbee (more like Trip teaching everyone else how to throw a Frisbee without hitting anyone in the face) and she pulls her sketchpad out again and looks around for a subject. There's a family eating sandwiches, a young couple ardently making out, a girl reading a book, and...him. He's surrounded by other people, half-talking to them and half building something out of blades of grass. He's got unruly sandy hair and blue eyes and a rumpled plaid shirt and she's not sure why, but she likes the way his angles fit together. And before she knows it, she's sketching something out, loose and rough but _something_ , and when she tears the page out of her notebook, it doesn't look bad.

Two days later, she sees him again at a cafe near school and she doesn't mean to but she ends up drawing him again. From several angles. Her pencil, which is usually temperamental and prone to sudden breakages, just seems to like him and she can hardly resist the opportunity to let it run wild. Her coffee goes cold, her scone lies untouched on her plate, and for almost an hour it's just her hand and the pencil and paper. It's a marvel every time, how lines and circles and dots can come together to make the world she knows, and 

Later that night, she spreads the drawings she's done out on the kitchen table and stares down at them. They're good, better than any of the other portraits she's done, and all she wants is to draw him again. Properly this time, with oils and canvas and the hours of work that a real portrait takes. She really shouldn't. He's a stranger, after all. He could be anyone—some awful banker type from downtown, one of the physics majors who always glare when someone else tries to take their cubicle in the library, a crazed ax murderer—and tracking him down so she can convince him to sit for her. Knowing her, she'd probably bolt halfway through the conversation.

“Hey, I think I know him,” Daisy says, tapping the paper as she passes by. Jemma freezes and drops her handful of colored pens.

“You know him? Really? How? Where from? Is he nice?” Jemma shuts her mouth with a snap, aware that she's said far too much. He's just a guy that she likes drawing, nothing more. 

“He's friends with Mack. He goes by his last name, I think...it's something starting with a F? I can ask and find out for you if you want,” Daisy offers. “He is kind of cute, if you squint sideways.”

“Not just if you squint sideways!” Jemma says indignantly. Daisy grins and Jemma has the sinking feeling that she's been trapped into admitting more than she meant to. “Look, don't say anything about it, okay? We're allowed to draw strangers for class—in fact, Professor Weaver says we should always be drawing—but he might think that it's a little strange. Is it strange?”

Daisy swears not to say anything but a week later, she's drawing in the same coffee shop when a shadow falls across her sketchbook and she looks up to see him looking down at her. “Your art's really good,” he blurts out.

Jemma just stares at him.

“Daisy showed me some. Which she probably wasn't supposed to, now that I think about it, but she kind of cornered me and told me that I needed to meet her friend. It was, uh, dramatic.” Fitz pauses, shifts from foot to foot, and then plunges forward. “She actually showed me a drawing that you did of me—not the real thing, one on her phone—and it was really good. You're—you're really talented.”

“Thank you.” She should look at her coffee. Or her sketchbook. Or the barista currently swearing at the espresso machine. Anywhere but at him, really. But she can't seem to look away and even worse, her hands are practically itching for her pencil. “Would it be all right if I drew you again?” she finds herself asking. “For a project?”

Unbearably, excruciatingly, slowly, Fitz nods.

The next weekend, he's at her and Daisy's apartment wearing battered jeans, another flannel, and a white t-shirt. “Is this all right for the drawing?” he asks anxiously. “I thought about wearing a suit or something, but Mack and Hunter refused to let me leave the house in it.”

“No, it's perfect. Just, uh, take a seat over there.” She points vaguely in the direction of the couch. “You'll probably want to get comfortable. This'll take a few hours, so...I can get you water if you want. You can take off your shoes or your jacket.”

“He could take off his shirt,” Daisy says innocently. “Like that life drawing class you had to take.” 

She's promptly banished after that.

Jemma and Fitz don't talk much for the first hour or so. It's just the scratch of her pencil as she marks out the initial outlines, the hiss of air as she lets paint out of the tube, and the whisper of her brush against the canvas, a melody that she knows by heart. Only she's hyper-aware of Fitz sitting across from her, of the way every little move and sigh he makes seems to send a jolt straight down her spine. It's absurd that someone she barely knows can make her feel this way. Improbable, impractical, completely unsuitable. And yet the little bursts of electricity simply refuse to stop zipping down her spine. 

“So what are you studying?” she says, an hour into the pose. “You can talk now. I've already done your mouth.”

“Engineering. Right now I'm working on a project with drones, trying to figure out uses for them at crime scenes.” His eyes light up when he talks about his work and Jemma's pleasantly surprised to find that she can follow along. Fitz knows what he does inside and out, yes, but he's considering and weighing his words for her, translating them from the dense technical language he speaks to something in between her paintbrushes and his electrical circuits. 

“I've done some reading on drones,” she admits.

“You read about drones for fun?” He leans forward excitedly and launches into a speech about the drone he's been training to retrieve Mack's tools until, laughing, she has to remind him not to break the pose. 

“I read about everything for fun.”

They don't stop talking for the next three hours and even after the session is done and she's put away her brushes, he stays curled up on her couch talking to her. About the paperback books scattered around her apartment, about his childhood running wild in Glasgow and hers in the manicured country lanes of an English village, about what makes her paint and him design, about everything they've loved and hated and liked and felt lukewarm indifference towards. Finally, reluctantly, he stands up to go and grabs his coat from where it's been draped across a chair.

“I—I guess I should head back. I've been told it's my turn to cook tonight,” he says and sticks his hands into his coat pockets. He doesn't make any more moves towards the door, though, and she doesn't usher him out. Just ask him, Jemma, a voice that sounds suspiciously like Daisy and Bobbi and every female friend she possesses whispers in her head. 

“What are you doing this weekend?” she asks, the words coming out of her mouth too loud and too quickly. “Because if you're not doing much, maybe we could have another portrait session. And maybe afterward, we could have dinner? Together, somewhere nice?”

“Dinner,” he says slowly. “Dinner somewhere nice—like a date?”

“Yes.” Jemma gulps down another breath and steels her courage. “Yes, exactly like a date.”

“That would be good. Great, actually. Pretty fantast--”

Jemma kisses him before she can think better of it. It's messy, as she leaves paint streaks in his hair and on his coat, and clumsy, as she stumbles when she goes up on her toes to kiss him and sends him reeling back against the wall, and entirely unplanned. But his mouth is soft and warm against hers and her hands fit nicely on the span of his shoulders and he kisses her back like there's nothing he'd rather be doing.

“You know, I don't know if I'm sure that you want to have dinner with me,” she says when she finally pulls away, fingers still firmly twined through his and beaming up at him. “Remind me, what was your answer?”

Fitz just kisses her again.


End file.
